An absorbing legal thriller that’s both powerful and delightfully nuanced.
In this novella, a freshly minted attorney at a prestigious firm becomes suspicious that his superiors are involved in a fraudulent scheme.
Adam Chauncey is as green as a lawyer can get, occupying the lowest rung on the ladder at Smithson and Dwyer, one of the toniest firms in Chicago. He’s invited to lunch by a senior partner, Bill Evans, a strange request that sparks another: The veteran attorney asks Adam to become a co-executor of a will he’s in charge of and refuses to name the document’s author. Naïve and quick to please a superior, Adam reflexively agrees. Suddenly, when Evans shows signs of cognitive diminishment and steps aside, Adam finds himself in charge of a will that represents a considerable estate, one formerly owned by Percy Landsman. The will is complex and peculiar—Percy has left much of his largesse to his estranged brother, Eric, and mentions his “original birth family.” Adam discovers Percy was the product of an illicit affair between an unknown father and a Latine house maid. With tantalizing suspense, Gilbert follows Adam’s gathering suspicions that something is amiss at his own firm, especially when he finds, with the help of Sally Warren—a paralegal for whom he develops romantic affections—a copy of the will. The duplicate document features contradictory scrawled notes. When he turns to his bosses for clarity, he encounters a “conspiracy of silence” or vague threats.
The author skillfully combines an utterly dark subject matter—the furtive exploitation of the dead—with generally lightsome prose and plenty of comic relief, often conveyed in the flirtatious banter between Adam and Sally. They are outsiders in this world of powerful privilege. With great delicacy, Gilbert explores the ways in which both of them are simultaneously (and contradictorily) repulsed by this cosmos and pine to belong to it. In fact, they’re eventually faced with a stark moral dilemma that compels them to choose either their upwardly mobile ambitions or their sense of decency. It’s intriguing to see Adam, an “innocent, gangly young lawyer,” transform from a callow dupe into a more mature man who reflects with depth on what motivates him. When Sally suggests he might be inspired by a sense of justice, he’s uncertain: “That’s a nice way of putting it, but I’m not sure of my motivation anymore, except that something bothered me from the start—and is still bothering me. I thought I had put it to rest. But I guess I hadn’t. And I don’t like the feeling.” While there’s obviously a potent moral dimension to Gilbert’s tale, this is not the literary expression of some stale lesson drawn from a catechism, or a simplistic parable offered in a professorial spirit of didacticism. The author avoids any hint of tendentious proselytizing or facile reductionism. This is a marvelous novella, piercingly intelligent yet thoroughly unpretentious.
An absorbing legal thriller that’s both powerful and delightfully nuanced.Pub Date: Sept. 9, 2023
ISBN: 9781956823219
Page Count: 150
Publisher: Joshua Tree Publishing
Review Posted Online: Nov. 27, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.
Another sweltering month in Charlotte, another boatload of mysteries past and present for overworked, overstressed forensic anthropologist Temperance Brennan.
A week after the night she chases but fails to catch a mysterious trespasser outside her town house, some unknown party texts Tempe four images of a corpse that looks as if it’s been chewed by wild hogs, because it has been. Showboat Medical Examiner Margot Heavner makes it clear that, breaking with her department’s earlier practice (The Bone Collection, 2016, etc.), she has no intention of calling in Tempe as a consultant and promptly identifies the faceless body herself as that of a young Asian man. Nettled by several errors in Heavner’s analysis, and even more by her willingness to share the gory details at a press conference, Tempe launches her own investigation, which is not so much off the books as against the books. Heavner isn’t exactly mollified when Tempe, aided by retired police detective Skinny Slidell and a host of experts, puts a name to the dead man. But the hints of other crimes Tempe’s identification uncovers, particularly crimes against children, spur her on to redouble her efforts despite the new M.E.’s splenetic outbursts. Before he died, it seems, Felix Vodyanov was linked to a passenger ferry that sank in 1994, an even earlier U.S. government project to research biological agents that could control human behavior, the hinky spiritual retreat Sparkling Waters, the dark web site DeepUnder, and the disappearances of at least four schoolchildren, two of whom have also turned up dead. And why on earth was Vodyanov carrying Tempe’s own contact information? The mounting evidence of ever more and ever worse skulduggery will pull Tempe deeper and deeper down what even she sees as a rabbit hole before she confronts a ringleader implicated in “Drugs. Fraud. Breaking and entering. Arson. Kidnapping. How does attempted murder sound?”
Forget about solving all these crimes; the signal triumph here is (spoiler) the heroine’s survival.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9821-3888-2
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.
When a man accused of rape turns up dead, an Early American town seeks justice amid rumors and controversy.
Lawhon’s fifth work of historical fiction is inspired by the true story and diaries of midwife Martha Ballard of Hallowell, Maine, a character she brings to life brilliantly here. As Martha tells her patient in an opening chapter set in 1789, “You need not fear….In all my years attending women in childbirth, I have never lost a mother.” This track record grows in numerous compelling scenes of labor and delivery, particularly one in which Martha has to clean up after the mistakes of a pompous doctor educated at Harvard, one of her nemeses in a town that roils with gossip and disrespect for women’s abilities. Supposedly, the only time a midwife can testify in court is regarding paternity when a woman gives birth out of wedlock—but Martha also takes the witness stand in the rape case against a dead man named Joshua Burgess and his living friend Col. Joseph North, whose role as judge in local court proceedings has made the victim, Rebecca Foster, reluctant to make her complaint public. Further complications are numerous: North has control over the Ballard family's lease on their property; Rebecca is carrying the child of one of her rapists; Martha’s son was seen fighting with Joshua Burgess on the day of his death. Lawhon weaves all this into a richly satisfying drama that moves suspensefully between childbed, courtroom, and the banks of the Kennebec River. The undimmed romance between 40-something Martha and her husband, Ephraim, adds a racy flair to the proceedings. Knowing how rare the quality of their relationship is sharpens the intensity of Martha’s gaze as she watches the romantic lives of her grown children unfold. As she did with Nancy Wake in Code Name Hélène (2020), Lawhon creates a stirring portrait of a real-life heroine and, as in all her books, includes an endnote with detailed background.
A vivid, exciting page-turner from one of our most interesting authors of historical fiction.Pub Date: Dec. 5, 2023
ISBN: 9780385546874
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Aug. 12, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2023
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